SERIES

America in the WorldSven Beckert and Jeremi Suri, Series Editors

American history is no longer the history of the nation-state alone. Instead of segregating the history of North America from the rest of the world, some of the newest and most exciting writing integrates America in the world. This movement toward transnational perspectives is taking shape across time periods, methodological preferences, and fields of analysis. American historians will continue to examine the “exceptional” elements of the nation’s history, and they will continue to produce local studies. Within the next decade, however, even the most locally centered and “exceptionalist” scholarship will be much more informed by attention to networks, identities, and processes that transcend the nation-state.

This series will bring together the work of a new generation of scholars writing the history of “global America.” There is a palpable sense of excitement about such a new perspective. Indeed, the most forward-looking scholars have already begun to broaden the geographical and conceptual range of analysis for many diverse themes in American history–including such classic topics as the American Revolution, slavery, abolitionism, Reconstruction, labor activism, the destruction of Native American societies, Progressivism, the Civil Rights Movement, and Cold War politics.

This series will publish the most innovative, well-researched, and elegantly written books in this emerging genre. In addition, we expect that the series will serve as a catalyst to encourage more work in this direction. The books that we publish will provide compelling models for what it means to understand American history as an integral part of worldwide transformations over the last four centuries. In contrast to other series that focus exclusively on the Cold War, international relations, or politics alone, we will provide markers for internationalizing American history that span the entire course of the nation’s existence, and broaden assumptions about the international beyond foreign policy. This series will take politics and foreign policy seriously, but it will treat them as facets, not centerpieces, of a larger global matrix. No other book series covers this proposed terrain. We expect to transform historical scholarship as we bring America into the World.> more